When you work for a digital marketing agency, your clients expect you to push the envelope, to develop new ways of generating brand recognition and attracting qualified leads. Last year, savvy Google Ads administrators did just that when they “discovered” a “secret” match type – Phrase Match Modifier. GrowthEngine Media is currently testing this new tool in select clients’ campaigns.

Keyword match types control when Google displays your paid search ads in search results. Google Ads’ default match type is Broad Match. Using this setting, your ads may display on queries that include misspellings, synonyms, related searches, and other variations of your match phrase. Broad Match shows your ad to as wide an audience as possible.

More advanced match types include broad match modifier, which only shows ads on searches that include specific words and their close variants; phrase match, which shows ads on searches that match a phrase or close variations of a phrase; and exact match, which shows ads on searches that exactly match the words in a phrase, though not the order.

Phrase Match Modifier is the fifth and most recent match type. It allows Google Ads administrators to combine keyword phrases with modifying words not in that phrase.

The new match type is extremely effective “when the order of specific words has a large impact on intent (e.g., free care vs care free), but you want to add modifiers, like a city name, that do not require a specific order for semantic relevance,” explained Search Engine Journal’s Ian Sherk in a March 2018 article.

As a Google Premier Partner digital marketing agency with access to valuable insights on Google’s preferred practices, GrowthEngine Media eagerly embraces opportunities to improve our clients’ paid search strategies. Our Google Ads team will introduce this new control more widely over the coming months.